Afghan E-Mail Seen as Too Geek to Be True

By KATIE HAFNER

Published: November 29, 2001

IT seemed a perfectly innocuous, even uplifting little story.

Jon Katz, a columnist for Slashdot.org, an online news site, wrote a short article about an e-mail message he had received from Junis, an Afghan programmer in his mid-20's living in a village near Kabul. Junis, whom Mr. Katz has never met, wrote that with ''the dust of the pickup trucks carrying the Taliban'' out of his village still visible, he unearthed his ancient Commodore computer from underneath a chicken coop, where it had been hidden for years.

The poignant tale of Junis's reunion with his computer as he told it to Mr. Katz in a message routed through Kabul, Islamabad and London was ''a reminder that there are civil liberties, and then there are civil liberties,'' Mr. Katz wrote. Computers had been banned under the Taliban. People caught using them could face death, Mr. Katz wrote.

But no sooner had Mr. Katz posted his article on Nov. 20 than skeptics piped up by the hundreds. Most of the criticism centered on the account of Junis's Commodore computer, an anemic machine from the 1980's.

''Jon, you were trolled,'' wrote one doubter. ''Exactly how does an Ubergeek in Afghanistan use an ancient Commodore to download and play movies?''

''The entire article smells like fiction,'' another wrote.

''It just seems too-too-too much like what we geeks want to hear,'' wrote another.

There were calls for further technical details, and for the original e-mail from Junis. Call it the pouncing-nerd syndrome. Slashdot.org, which advertises itself as a site that offers ''news for nerds,'' is often filled with provocative postings.

Articles on Slashdot are usually followed by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of comments from the site's readers, many of whom are technically proficient. Mr. Katz said he had grown accustomed to attacks.

''The public threads on Slashdot are very contentious,'' he said. ''I've been accused of everything under the sun, from pedophilia to plagiarism to inventing a mythical Jon Katz.''

Mr. Katz, 54, who has been writing columns for Slashdot.org for three years and is a former media critic for Rolling Stone and New York magazine, was steadfast in his defense of the article.

Mr. Katz said he could not be specific about the identity of Junis because of the ''perilous position'' Junis is still in. But he said he had very little doubt that Junis existed and that he was writing the truth.

Electronic connections of any kind are indeed a scarce commodity in Afghanistan. A correspondent in Kabul said this week that the only way to make calls from there -- and by extension, connect to the Internet -- was to use satellite phones, which are available in shops across the city but are expensive. But Mr. Katz noted that on Web sites devoted to South Asian issues, ''I've seen a number of messages that clearly appear to have come from Afghanistan'' in recent weeks.

Mr. Katz said he had been in e-mail contact with Junis since the mid-1990's, when Mr. Katz worked at HotWired, an online arm of Wired Magazine that is now defunct. Mr. Katz said Junis was one of a far-flung band of techies connected to HotWired who called themselves the Geek Force, and was probably capable of souping up an old Commodore computer for more modern uses.

But Mr. Katz didn't rule a hoax out entirely. ''Is it possible that going back to HotWired, someone snookered me and created a false identity for himself?'' he said. ''I suppose it is. But that seems ridiculous. Why would he do that? And for what? It's not like we're discussing national security.''

Jeff Bates, executive editor of Slashdot.org, said that he had no reason to doubt the report and that he was aware that Mr. Katz had known Junis for a long time. ''I know that Jon has reason to trust him if nothing else,'' he said.

Mr. Katz said Junis had agreed to take part in a public question-and-answer session on Slashdot.org soon, once things settle down a bit in Afghanistan.

Mr. Katz said he had also received hundreds of sympathetic e-mail messages from readers, many of them with unsolicited offers to send money to upgrade Junis's computer.